If you spent more than 10 seconds on Twitter over the weekend, or visited a news site, or had any kind of conversation with a TV-watching human being, you are probably aware that Netflix dropped all 13 episodes of the third season of House of Cards.
Netflix's binge-watching model, while undeniably successful, carries a certain amount of pressure for viewers and critics alike. If you wanted to be a part of the conversation (or insulate yourself from spoilers), you couldn't just sample the premiere; you had to gorge on the whole feast. This kind of release leads, inevitably, to a race to the finish, with critics sprinting to compile 13 reviews in time to catch House of Cards' brief window of cultural relevance. Then all 13 episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt will premiere, and the entire process starts over again.
The House of Cards problem is an extreme example of the churn that essentially defines the way we're now expected to consume culture and art. Every week brings new movies, and new albums, and new books, and TV premieres, and TV finales. Everything gets its minute of mass cultural relevance before it ends up getting shelved again, resurfacing only if it's nominated for an award. With so much great work arriving every day, it's easy to get caught up in the cultural news cycle — but stepping outside it comes with its own unique set of virtues.
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While most of my Twitter feed was buzzing about House of Cards, I spent much of my weekend reading Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen's The Rabbit Back Literature Society, which I knew pretty much nothing about when I picked it up on a whim a few weeks ago. (Okay, I wasn't completely unspoiled: I saw a blurb calling it a cross between Twin Peaks and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and I'm not made of stone.) The book, which was published in Finland in 2006 but didn't arrive stateside until January of 2015, is a weird story about a group of famous, interconnected writers and the creepy game they play. But I didn't know any of that before I started reading.
I don't bring this up to flaunt my specialness or slight House of Cards fans who chose to spend the weekend binging on the show; I bring it up to highlight the relatively rare opportunity to go into a piece of art without any roadmap or compass, and to experience it without any kind of external opinion to influence or interrupt your own experience of the work. There are enormous benefits to consuming culture as part of a larger group: impassioned debates, brilliant pieces of analysis, and the general sense of joy in experiencing a work of art with other people. But the downside of the modern cultural conversation is that it's nearly impossible to avoid going into a piece of art without some kind of preconception — no matter how carefully you try to keep your mind unbiased, some prior knowledge inevitably seeps in.
When I review a movie or a TV show, I do my best to stay in a bubble: no other reviews, no interviews, nothing that might tip my opinion one way or the other until I've had the chance to get my own thoughts jotted down. But it's increasingly difficult to avoid being inundated with opinions about everything that earns a spot in the ongoing cultural conversation: trailers (and reactions to trailers), errant tweets, bombastic headlines and pull-quoted interviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores and box-office grosses, premiere ratings or book sales numbers. Everything tells you something — and once you know something, you can't un-ring the bell. In the modern climate, a piece of art isn't just a piece of art; it's the lynchpin in a larger series of interlocking conversations about politics, and business, and the broader trends that determine the modern cultural landscape.
Untethering yourself from that cycle altogether would be a mistake — for one thing, you'd miss a ton of brilliant work — but tackling a piece of art without any expectations or foreknowledge whatsoever is an increasingly rare opportunity. For me, reading The Rabbit Back Literature Society — a book from a country I've never visited, by an author I knew nothing about, with a plot I knew nothing about, and which no one I know has ever read — was an experience it would have been easy to miss. But the deafening lack of response to its publication also gave me a rare opportunity to work on its prickly, slippery mysteries in a bubble, without a single outside thought tipping me in any direction, and without any idea where I was going.
Fortunately, if you're looking for a unique cultural experience, it's an experiment that's relatively simple to repeat. Go to a library, close your eyes, pull a random book off the shelf, and start reading. Scroll through the genre of your choice on Netflix and click on a random movie without looking at the cast, or the release date, or aggregated number of stars Netflix subscribers have assigned it. Type the first word that comes into your head into Spotify, and play the first song that pops up. Give yourself a truly unpredictable, truly personal chance to take in a work of art, and see what you discover.
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